Roubaozi left us a bottle of wine. He was given it, but couldn’t take it home because of the unprocessed wood box it was in. Well, he could’ve left the box behind and just taken the bottle, but no, he just gave us the wine.
So the wine is called Hope-Full. It claims to be malbec brewed in 1996 in Mendoza, Argentina. Actaually, the label on the bottle says it is “Elaborado y Embotellado en Origen por Simonassi Lyon S.A.” and gives and address in Rama Caida, San Rafael, Mendoza.
Alright, so I have established that a company called Simonassi Lyon S.A. does produce malbec at exactly the address printed on the bottle. But the malbec on their website looks nothing like the bottle sitting on the desk next to me, and there’s nothing on the site bearing the name “Hope-Full”.
So I have another potential lead to follow: The Chinese company whose name is carved into the lid of the wooden box this wine came in.
Tangent: Wow, I left my tea sitting a bit too long. It’s quite bitter, now. Good.
Seems I found it: 汇ç¦?粮油集团有é™?å…¬å?¸. Now that is a terrible website in atrocious English. Thing is, under product info they list only soybean meal and soybean oil. No wine. In fact, I’ve searched through as much of that site as I can, and can find no mention of either wine or Argentina. And adding ‘malbec’ into that google search dredges up nothing useful. Swapping malbec for Simonassi Lyon SA yields even less.
And so basically I have no idea what it was I drank last night. Well, I know it was dry red wine claiming to hail from Argentina. I know that my first reaction was “Huh? That’s kinda salty!” I know that after that first mouthful it just tasted like any Chinese dry red wine. I know that I reacted to it the way I usually react to red wine: Lots of weird dreams last night, and my head felt oddly heavy but kind of light when I woke up, and although my stomach felt empty, I really could not bear the thought of putting anything more solid than yoghurt into it. And then I had to run for the toilet, and yet the only thing I consumed yesterday that I might not be used to or that was of suspect origin was that wine.
So I found websites for both companies, but I can’t find any connection between the two. So what exactly was in that bottle?
And just because I don’t have enough to worry about: There’s a rather suspicious lump on my skin on my back just at the base of my neck. We’ve been keeping an eye on it for a while now, but it seems to have gotten a little bigger. Going to the hospital early tomorrow morning to get it checked out.
